Vinny Chase Is The Bella Swan Of Hollywood Douchebags In ‘Entourage’

People think Entourage sucks because the characters are LA douchebags, but that’s wrong. You could make a fantastic show about LA douchebags. Swingers was about LA douchebags, and it was great. The promise of a show set in the world of LA douchebags produced by a guy (Mark Wahlberg) who’d lived among them since his teens was the only reason I ever watched Entourage in the first place. I lasted one or two seasons, long enough to realize that Entourage didn’t actually have anything to say about LA douchebags, and in fact felt like it was written by a guy in Iowa daydreaming about how awesome it must be to be an LA douchebag.

Entourage doesn’t suck because it’s about LA douchebags, it sucks because it doesn’t have the balls to let its characters be douchebags. It’s a vehicle for viewers vicariously acting out their douche fantasies while the characters themselves just shrug and pretend to be nice, practically begging an invisible focus group somewhere to say they have heart. No agency, no culpability. They didn’t land on douche rock, douche rock landed on them!

OH MY GOD, E, DID YOU JUST BANG TWO SETS OF SIAMESE CIRCUS TWINS ON JOSH GAD’S JETSKI? HOW DO YOU DO IT?

(*shrug*) Dunno, bro. Sh*t was crazy.

You know how Bella Swan in Twilight is just this barely written empty shell into which adolescent girls can inject themselves to experience sparkly vampire love and ethnic werewolf temptation? Vinny Chase is like that, a hollow vessel in a 90s George Clooney wig who bangs porn stars and hangs out with celebrities. E and Turtle are the hollow vessel friends who get to watch him do it. Reading a good script, the characters develop separate personalities without being described physically, and even before you’ve associated actors with them. That’s called “characterization.” By contrast, Entourage which might as well star three mannequins wearing different hats. People make fun of Johnny Drama for being a cartoon character, which he is, but at least he’s something. The other three aren’t even there. If Entourage was Seinfeld, there’d be a Kramer, but no Jerry, George, or Elaine. There’d be a poor man’s Kramer and three Kevin Connollys.

The less analytical version of those last five or six paragraphs, by the way, is “Entourage isn’t funny.” Not offensive, not morally bankrupt, not the death knell of western civilization, just sort of hacky and lame. Ironically, it probably wouldn’t get bashed for being boorish so much if it had any balls. I think I sort of chuckled twice, once at something Johnny Drama did and once at T.I., who displays more personality in a two-second cameo than Adrien Connolly, Kevin Grenier, and Seth Ferrara do the entire rest of the movie. (Those are their names, right? I’m not looking it up). The jokes have to be overly broad because the characters aren’t actually characters.

Here’s the plot, and maybe grab yourself a diaper before you read this because you might sh*t yourself when you hear about these high stakes: Ari, now a studio head, gave Vince $100 million to direct his first movie, which we’re told is great, but one of the financiers (a Texan played by Haley Joel Osment), wants to cut Johnny Drama out of the movie because he’s jealous that Vince is banging Emily Ratajkowski (don’t think about it don’t think about it don’t think about it). Turtle, who’s a billionaire now (don’t ask) could solve this entire problem simply by putting up a few million of his own, and offers to, but Vince tells him, “I’d never ask you to do that, bro.”

That’s it. That’s the entire conflict. And you know what? That would be fine under different circumstances. That these characters inhabit a world so low-stakes that their biggest worry is which rich guy’s millions they’re going to blow is one of the only honest parts of Entourage. But the central hallmark of Entourage is that it never satirizes, comments on, or utilizes the world in which it exists for comedy in any way. It’s a show about a group of dudes that feels like it was written by an alien who learned about dudes from back issues of Esquire.

Warner Bros

Having been produced by a guy who was actually the leader of a Hollywood entourage, you’d think that Entourage might have some good dirt, some wild anecdotes, a cutting observation or three, in the tradition of a great Hollywood memoir. Instead, the only observation it ever makes is basically, “Bro this one time my buddy Dave banged a chick and it was crazy.” Was it? Was it that crazy? The fact that you think getting laid makes for such a wild story makes me question how much you’ve actually been laid.

Watching Entourage is like having a friend who’s lived a crazy life but is too dumb and inarticulate to tell you about it. You’ll try to ask him about it at first, but after a few months of nothing but shrugs and “dunno, bro, it was crazy” you eventually stop bothering.

I might actually watch Entourage if it was the Ari Gold show. Ari is the only Entourage character with a personality and depth, who doesn’t feel like a semi-autobiographical version of someone, lionized and scrubbed clean of identifiers, whose dialogue doesn’t sound like an issue of Maxim from 2008 came to life and started asking you if its shoes matched. He’s a character with multiple problems and when he solves them, could be said to do it in an “Ari Gold-esque” way. You actually get a sense of him as a person, this vulgar, boorish sweet-talker who’s good at his job, most of which consists of talking people into things. Vinny Chase, by contrast, is supposedly this singularly magnetic movie star. At one point, Ari says “That’s what movie stars are supposed to do! They’re supposed to walk into a party for two seconds and steal your girlfriend, because they’re a movie star and you’re just a civilian!” Yet whenever we see Vinny, he has all the charisma of a ham sandwich. It doesn’t matter how many random tits and celebrity cameos you add in if the entire plot revolves around a bowl of oatmeal with eyebrows.

Incidentally, the Entourage movie has lots of tits and random celeb cameos, including like six shots of Mark Cuban (both a tit and a celebrity) doing that classic, beatific Mark Cuban face.

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HA HA BUSINESS

If Seinfeld‘s famous rule was “no hugging, no learning,” Entourage‘s is “all hugging, no joking.” I’ve never seen a supposed comedy show so unwilling to make fun of itself. It has to hire 10 football stars and 15 rappers just so someone there can actually do something funny instead of just whining about which teenybopper they’re banging and begging you to commiserate.

Watch the trailer – notice how there aren’t any jokes in it, only amped up drama and lifestyle porn? That’s the draw of the show. Not interesting characters, just cool cars you could imagine yourself driving, sluts you could imagine yourself banging (ooh, this slut has faux wood paneling!). They try to end each episode with a bro hugged and a lesson learned (and the fact that episodes always seem to end with the gang in triumph on a red carpet somewhere is a dead giveaway that the draw is wish fulfillment, not comedy), only you don’t know what they actually learned or why they even like each other. In a classic Entourage pump up speech that Vinny Chase gives to his bros next to a pool (always next to a f*cking pool), he says, “You know why? Because we do the things we love, not the things people with money tell us to!”

Really? Because by my count, you did one random bikini bimbo on a yacht, one porny broad in a hot tub, one random young lady on molly in Turtle’s bedroom during a party, and Emily Ratajkowski. Which we never actually get to see, by the way. F*ck you.

Grade: D

Vince Mancini is a writer and comedian living in San Francisco. A graduate of Columbia’s non-fiction MFA program, his work has appeared on FilmDrunk, the UPROXX network, the Portland Mercury, the East Bay Express, and all over his mom’s refrigerator. Fan FilmDrunk on Facebook, find the latest movie reviews here.

Random Screening Note: I walked into a 9:45 showing of Entourage on Tuesday (packed, btw) at 9:38, and looked up to see Kevin Dillon on the screen, drinking Johnny Walker in the back of a Cadillac. “What the hell?” I thought to myself, “Did they start the movie early?” I had to walk back out and check the marquee to make sure I was in the right place. I was. Turns out, it was only a Johnny Walker ad starring Johnny Drama playing before the previews before the Johnny Drama movie. Perfect.

I always found it equally annoying that the characters had to constantly mention that they were from Queens, and how “tough” and “street smart” that made them. I think I actually would have liked the series more if the characters were from a random Midwestern suburb.

Could not have described it better myself. And Swingers was twenty times the movie I presume this is–I say presume because I wouldn’t see it with a gun to my head and I made it through four seasons of the show, which I was hate-watching by the end.

If Vinny Chase is so sure his movie is going to be a hit then why wouldn’t he have his billionaire friend invest a few million in it, (for whatever reason and please don’t feel obligated to tell me more), and presumably recoup his investment with a nice profit as well. Isn’t that how business works? Pretty dick move Vinny.

If my friend became a billionaire thanks to me bringing him out to L.A. and I needed an investment loan from him to finish my dream project, you can bet your sweet ass and half a titty I would be hitting him up for it.

I’ve read three or four reviews of this now, and I’m shocked not only that only one review brought this up, but that all four reviews aren’t just that description with “HAHAHAHAHAHA” filling up another six paragraphs.

Did the show really go down hill after the first few seasons, or did all the high school and college kids watching Entourage just mature? I used to love Bill Simmons’s writing and listening to Phish and the Dave Matthews Band. Now I just enjoy the smell of a freshly cut lawn, good scotch and ignoring my children.

The men throwing those parties are men of that age. Unless your dad is a billionaire, no 20 something in this city has the money. The ones that do know better than to spend their own so they’re sponsored like a motherfucker.

Entourage (the show) deserved the benefit of the doubt at first because Wahlberg, despite his Wahlberglary, had made some choices more interesting than those of the typical underwear thespian: Boogie Nights, working with David O. Russell twice. He gets no benefit now.

And yet, he is still a pretty good actor–I thought he was excellent in The Departed and I laughed a lot when I saw Ted.

In tiny doses, it’s hard to tell that the show is as dull and as dumb as it is. There’s a lot of time spent alluding to a larger story that never really comes to fruition, plus Ari shows up at least once an episode to inject a little bit of life into the proceedings. So little happens each episode that you don’t really dwell on the fact that nothing is really happening. I’d forget the story 15 minutes after an episode ended. You really need at least half a season before the emptiness and excess start to wear on you.

The first two seasons were good because the guys are all out of their element and are outsiders. The more inside they got, the lower the stakes got. The closest they got to failure was when Medellin bombed. I thought that was going to be a good thing for the show, but they basically reset everything ASAP and made OUR BRO VINNY hot shit again.

I partially hope Kevin Dillon logs on here to defend himself and the movie a la Kevin Smith, but I imagine his Internet prowess is limited to repeatedly typing “www.google.com” directly into the Google search bar.

You know that old urban legend where if you make a silly face long enough it will be permanent. Kevin Dillon’s face is frozen in “just found out his beloved wife or girlfriend is the star attraction at a Tijuana Donkey Show” mode.

I remember when I had a couple friends in college that swore by this show, and they had me all intrigued by the world-building and cameos and what not. I remember asking a bunch of canon questions like, “So how famous and successful is Vince really” or something. Then they sat me down to watch an episode and I laughed about as much as I did the time someone put Meet the Spartans on and I elected to go home and go to sleep instead of stay and finish it.

The biggest fan of Entourage I ever met was an ultimate frat bro. I played beer pong with him once and after he got over his disbelief about me never having watched the show, he moved on to insisting that an integral part of the game involved something called the “Naw N-gger’.

@Stonecutter To get brownie points with the woman who would later become my wife, I watched that show sometime around 2007 and lemme tell you, it was always Lifestyle porn and everyone on that show is horrible. It wasn’t very good.

@Dan Seitz A little off topic but, brah, I think there’s enough uproxxers to do an iZombie finale liveblog thing. Last week’s episode was iNSANE!

I tried rewatching some of the series on HBO go to gauge my interest in the movie. It’s terrible. I wasn’t even upset with the actors or writers, I was upset with myself for being such an idiot in my youth.

The show is a fantastic cultural time capsule, dialogue wise. Especially the first two seasons in 2004 and 2005, a time long ago where faggot, slut and retard were acceptable terms that can be thrown around at will.

Seriously. I think alot of us still consider the 14 years since 9/11 to all be the same decade, but this movie is the first thing I can think of that demonstrates how dated the mid 2000s culture is now.

Also lets not forget all the hot young stars of the mid aughts whose career was killed by this show: Mandy Moore, Samarie Armstrong, Lil Bow Wow. I’m pretty sure the list goes on and on. I’m worried for Ronda Rousey now.

Wow! That was perhaps the most brutal and honest takedown of the show I’ve ever witnessed. I too made it only a few episodes past the first season because of a roommate’s insistence who I’d mistakenly believed had a modicum of taste when it came to entertainment. Piven is great as Ari, and Drama is, as you say, at least something. Everyone else in the show is just a stock person. My dislike for the show is infectious, in that anyone associated with it forever becomes tainted in my mind. In spite of the fact that I really liked Ted and I heart Huckabees, I can’t stand Mark Wahlberg, and the dislike is never far from my mind when he’s on-screen. Well said, Vince.

Yeah, it’s like people who liked Dukes of Hazard or The A team TV shows when they were younger absolutely loved the films. If you like the original source then it’s a definite you would love any other version of it.

Freddie Prinze Jr. (Narrator): “…and as the Two Coreys got up to surrender their table, Lukas Haas said “leave the bitches”. Right then, everyone at the Viper Room knew it was the changing of the guard – the Pussy Posse stole their table, their ladies, and all their self-respect. That was also the infamous night Tobey Maguire had to throw down with Devon Sawa…”

Lukas Haas: “We were doing that mad shit all the time though, we were making that crazy Man in the Iron Mask money! With money, comes power, cums bitches. That was the Pussy Posse motto! I remember Ryan Phillipe asked if he could join the crew and Leo told him, “Tell Reese to give me a piece… I’ll pound dat pussy like shit thru a geese!”. Leo was a poet like that… ever since he went method in Romeo and Juliet. Well, you know, Ryan was cool with it. He just wanted to belong man, but that Reese was a straight up B. The PP ain’t monsters though, we’d never do anything to hurt her!”

Christina Ricci: “So the Pussy Posse asked me to beat Reese’s ass. That bitch had it coming for stealing my role in Pleasantville that Tobey promised I’d get for sleeping with him and Corin Nemic. So one night, I get coked out of my mind and I find her chilling over at the Palms pool. I honestly don’t remember what happened after that.”

Corin Nemic: “So Ricci just collapses right there in the middle of the cabana! She starts pulling a River Phoenix, floppin around like a fish. Leo was like “not again!!” and the Pussy Posse ran off before the cops came. I followed them, but when I got to the limo the doors were locked and then they peeled away running over my foot! Then they reversed and tried to back over me… those guys, always pulling pranks like that. It was cool though, they wrote my limp into an episode of PLCL.”

Lukas Haas: “Parker Lewis was not a part of our group! Tobey only kept him around cause he was so fugly, he made Tobey cute by comparison. One day Leo got so sick of him, so the PP decided to teach him a little lesson. Parker Lewis had the lead in School Ties and was so happy about his big break, then Leo had his people call the studio – we got him fired and they hired me in his place! Totally ruined his career! Of course, I got arrested stealing that jet ski with Brad Renfro, so they gave the part to that butt muncher Brandon Fraiser and the rest is history.”

Freddie Prinze Jr. (Narrator): “For a long time, Leo and his Pussy Posse were on top, stomping on whoever got in their way. But soon they would collide with an equally powerful force: The Vagina Vanguard. The Double V consisted of the new up and comers… Matt Damon, Ben and Casey Affleck, Jake Busey, and Jerry O’Connell’s brother Jake. The war was about to start and the clubs of L.A. would never be the same again….”

Goes to show how much I know about the female body when I didn’t even realize they were fake.

Also that movie is underrated. I watched it again on cable a couple months ago and its held up pretty well, despite how sappy the protagonist guy (the young guy who got killed by Raylan in the last episode of Justified) could get at times. Angry, meatier Katherine Heigl was the best too.